If Google got a haircut, a tie and a suit, would it be Microsoft? Prepare yourself. It's a new month, and that can only mean a tsunami of articles on the popularity of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox will flood the globe's news aggregators. For non-mobile computers, March followed the trend emerging over the past 12 months: growth for Chrome, a drop in use of IE and Firefox stuck in a …
I don't mind Google sharing the browser market*, or the email client market*, or the productivity suite market* with Microsoft. Competition is a great thing for the end user. It was a lack of competition that resulted in the execrable IE6, or Windows ME.
What I really would mind was Google displacing MS at the top of the heap. That "do no evil" plaque is already looking tarnished, and a market dominance in areas other than ads would hasten its demise, I'm sure.
* Yes, I am aware that other products exist, but you know what I mean.
It's literally impossible for any company to be nice, they all have to "grow" and run a profit. But obviously you can return a good profit merely by dodging tax which is definitely evil, you're simply not contributing to infrastructure investment your business so sorely needs.
Google, Apple and Microsoft are all as bad as each other. But all have contributed to open source quite heavily, so to talk about not using any of their products is stupid (yes you Eadon).
Wrote :- "Google, Apple and Microsoft are all as bad as each other. But all have contributed to open source quite heavily"
A bit rich to describe MS as "contributed heaviliy". AFAIR, about the only thing MS have contributed is code to enable Windows to work with Linux in virtualisation situations, an exception that was in their own interest. And they only released the source of that code in response to legal challenge. Apple .. don't know, but I am aware of CUPS, Webkit, what else?
Both are in the noise level compared with Google's contributions.
MS big contribtuion was a general operating system that was not tied to proprietary hardware. It allowed huge competition from compenent and PC companies that drove prices down. Without MS, the Apple model would have domintated and $500 computers would be $5k each and without the current capability.
Personally not a big MS fan but you have to acknowledge that their operating systems which were compatible with such a wide range of equipment was key in shaping the market. Making OS that were compatible with a huge range of hardware, tossed together by DIYers all over the world is not a mean achievement. Much easier if you control the hardware and write the OS for that equipment.
Sorry, but no. Hardware-agnostic operating systems already existed before MS-DOS, and there was plenty of competition that drove computer prices far below $5K. Many computers from Commodore, Atari, etc. were typically in the $300-$1000 range (in 1980s dollars to be sure, but nevertheless what you're claiming is demonstrably false).
etaletc wrote :- "MS big contribtuion was a general operating system that was not tied to proprietary hardware........ you have to acknowledge that [MS] operating systems which were compatible with such a wide range of equipment was key in shaping the market... Much easier if you control the hardware and write the OS for that equipment."
CP/M was a general OS too, and UNIX has already been mentioned. In the period we are discussing, MS was tied to the Intel x86 processor (no hardware competition there for many years), and other than the processor, generic keyboard, 80x25 monitor, and disk drive they did not "write the OS for the equipment". Makers of printers, network cards, video cards , and even mice had to wrote their own drivers for DOS and Windows. Having got to a dominant position, MS only needed to lean back and let them do it.
That happened back then because the HW makers and (especially) the PC press picked MS almost at random as the horse to back - once some had picked it, the others had to follow even with misgivings. They could just as well have picked CP/M 86 [www.landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/history.html].
The price is a red herring. The personal computer revolution was happening MS or not, and with mass adoption prices would have tumbled anyway. In fact it shocks me how HIGH Microsoft have managed to maintain their prices considering their vast sales volumes.
The key was that IBM published the technical specifications of the IBM PC, just as they did for their larger, more expensive, products. That openness allowed other companies to supply add-in boards and peripherals that IBM did not supply, and when the BIOS was cloned, complete compatible systems could be produced.
As a *nix-based Brit, I do not know the exact details of MS's behaviour from personal experience, but the gist seemed to be 1. they promised system producers to undercut the prices of their OS competiors and 2. they would supply MSDOS even cheaper, if the manufacturers didn't offer a competing OS at all. This uncompetitive behaviour was eventually stopped, but too late for the competition.
It's not anti competitive (per se) to say that "if you supply only our products, they'll be cheaper than if you supply our rival's products.". The problem comes when you are preventing competition by charging too much for a too popular product.
Now, the thing that people forget about MS and their earlier products was that they killed the "Big Iron" UNIX and mini manufacturers' monopoly on the datacentre. In the late 80s/early 90s, if you wanted a file server, your choice was Novel, or Big Iron. MS came along and slashed the cost for a file server. Sure, they weren't as reliable as minis or unix, but they were good enough for a better than good enough product.
"It's literally impossible for any company to be nice..."
I'm not sure I agree with you there. The company I work for is profitable, successful, growing and has a genuinely earned reputation for being super-nice*. And this isn't a marketing gimmick, it's just how the company is run. It's a priority for the founders, the executive team and everyone down to the new hires.
Here's a clue: part of the reason we do well is because people love doing business with us, and word spreads. Helps that we're also shit-hot. ;)
So, not impossible, but not common either, more's the pity...
* 'Scuse Americanism, but it is an American company...
Once upon a time Microsoft were the good guys: they brought light to the darkness that was the PC. Then they became commercial and turned into the name you love to hate.
So we then got Google and I admit to being an original Google user. They brought light to the darkness which was the Internet and we believed the "do no evil" motto. But as ever the road to hell is paved with good intentions and Google morphed into another Money Munching Monster.
So where do we go now for honesty. For some time best value has been Firefox. OK so money is an issue but I get the feeling that Mozilla is made up of people who just want to make a living out of making things work and giving a service, not this Mega Money Madness that has struck others. So more power to Mozilla I say.
There is a lawsuit still going on after more than a decade between Novell (I doubt you've heard of them, they're gone now) and Microsoft on the exact same topic. Microsoft actively encouraged Novell to use a certain API which then has been dropped (by Microsoft of course) at a quarter's notice as you like to say. And there's more in case you want to know, and it is mostly about Microsoft.
What Mozilla needs to do is make an admin control panel, and MSI, and extol the virtues of Firefox LTS and make all three easily findable from the front page under 'Firefox for business' or something. There are third parties that help with admin and MSIs but Mozilla really needs to do that itself. Relatively little effort yet it would signal that they're serious about enterprise and there's no question whatsoever about privacy, unlike Chrome.
Check the analytic's for El Reg and tell us the % of people using IE6 still.
Its depressing having to design sites that view perfectly in this crappy system, but it needs to be done. While many people have shiny modern browsers at home and on their portable devices, the VAST majority of web surfers are doing it from this shitty works laptop/PC.
And they all use IE6
Seeing as the audience of The Register is predominantely IT literate I suspect very few IE6 users will appear in its website stats. For the past year I have refused to even check compatibility of any websites in IE6, let alone spend time recoding for the extremely limited number of users who might access any the websites I create. My customers are also unwilling to pay more for the additional time this would take.
IT literacy in the workforce doesn't equal IT literacy in the organisation. Despite working for an IT consultancy, of all things, I'm stuck with IE8 for internet access. There's an uphill struggle happening to get Chrome as an alternative browser which I expect will pay off by the end of the decade...
Well I've just check Google Analytics for the main website I run, which has a large number of visitors from emerging countries such as India and the Phillipines, and IE6 usage is running at under 2% down from nearer 15% a year ago. But I take your point about IT Literacy in workforce not equalling it in the Organisation. But still I would be surprised if there were very many IE6 users in The Register site stats.
Google Chrome and/or Firefox Portable is your friend. You may want to fake the user agent to fulfill the lust for power of your fascist, Microsoft minded security/network admins.
Anyway don't let yourself be fooled, IT consultancy does not always equal what you would expect.
Microsoft's own upgrade-from-IE6 website http://www.ie6countdown.com/ (which uses statistics from http://netmarketshare.com/ ) indicates that the Far East is really the only outpost left where IE6 has significant usage share on the open web. Well, let's be honest: China. In the UK it's well below 1%.
NetMarketShare weight their statistics - gathered from tracking bugs on websites using HitsLink, I believe - by overall internet traffic from each country, to rebalance the distribution of users of their customers' websites. StatCounter do not do this. It does mean there could be big sampling errors if relatively few users from China are browsing sites that use HitsLink.
I'm still not sure how well these companies deal with Network Address Translation, having multiple computers behind a single public IP address. The Far East notoriously also has very few public IPv4 addresses, with NATs being widely deployed. If the counter cannot see through the NAT, it will record a count of 1 for each browser used behind the NAT regardless of whether there is one instance or a million, heavily distorting the results.
It relies on weird profiles, which are often incompatible across different versions. At a large licence funded media organisation I worked at, I saw it frequently. As "hot desking" (ugh) was the norm, if someone switched from a machine running Firefox 9 to 12, for example, their favourites may not be visible. It caused no end of headaches to users who had been encouraged to use the browser for certain in-house applications before Chrome had existed as a serious alternative.
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THAT is what Microsoft really should do a lot more often. And then I'm not talking about the several inquiries they perform on their websites ("has this information helped you?") or the rants you see on several blogs.
I'm talking about listening to the people who actually use, respect and like your products, preferably before they move on to something else.
I'm quite new to the Visual Studio environment, but what I've done is go over a lot of forums (even trying to help out people myself if I could) in order to get a good impression of what could be done, what couldn't and which caveats I had to look out for. I also found the place where users could make feature requests...
If the number one request (link to visual studio feature request site) is to bring back colour to the program which gets 12.500 (approx) votes and 1100 (approx) comments then surely its not that hard to realize that something is seriously amiss here?
(for the record: when you look at page 2 or further you'll notice that an average good idea has approx. 1000 votes or lower (800+, 600+, etc). So twelve thousand is really a lot!).
But... Nope. Microsoft has very quickly worked up a theme editor to bring some sanity back to the user interface, but the colours remain mostly absent.
NOW realize that this same interface is in par with the overall 'new' Windows look and feel. Office has almost the same look and feel to it, including the NICE TO READ MENUS. And although I know there is a difference between programmers and office users, the line that separates them can be quite thin (sitting the whole day behind Visual Studio, or sitting the whole day behind Word, Excel and maybe PowerPoint).
That is in my opinion Microsoft's number one problem today. They don't seem to realize (enough) that they're no longer in a position where they can dictate the world. At least by far in the same amounts as they could in the past.
So yes; when people dislike something enough they move on. If you don't want that to happen you really need to come up with something which will attract people's interest instead of scaring them off whilst you keep on claiming that "you redefined the way people work".
Get your act together Microsoft, before the empire comes crumbling down.
The Internet is an echo chamber and the loudest noise often comes from a vocal minority, rather than necessecarily representing the population at large. Obviously anybody who does like the new VS UI (personally I'm not a big fan) isn't going to be submitting a feature request to leave it as it is, are they? And taken as a proportion of the overall number of Visual Studio users out there, twelve thousand isn't really very many at all.
Technology companies don't listen to their customers because your customer will tell you what they want now, which will often be a slightly improved version of what they have already. By the time you give them this slightly improved product, it will be 18 months after they want it.
If you asked people what they wanted from a smartphone in 2006 they would probably have said better battery, nicer camera, better keyboard. They wouldn't have said App store, multi-touch or stylus free touch screen. The customer basically doesn't know jack-shit in most cases, they aren't in the loop of what technology is available!
"Technology companies don't listen to their customers "
Tech companies tend to listen to those that actually pay them. If you are in the top 10 customers list for a tech company they will do all sorts of crazy things to add colour, menu items and hold off retiring applications that only you use.
We use Google Apps for business here, and in fairness, they are pretty good. Lots of functionality (even if Docs can be a bit flaky), lots of good collaboration tools. Only thing which grates is the constant new interfaces on GMail (got round by using Outlook instead) and the Calendar.
Chrome itself however? Kill it, kill it with fire. So far I;ve seen it reduce well specced laptops to a crawl, fill up every C: drive it can find with crap, start up 20 useless processes in Task Manager, forget passwords randomly and generally be a little bitch. I've stuck with Firefox and it seems to work much better,
Was needing to purchase some goods from a manufacturer in the north of England yesterday and for the first time in at least 3 years I was unable to proceed as the site required IE 6 now this left me with three options,
1) Install it in wine and piss around trying to get the bugger to work. I don't care what anyone else says I've never found wine reliable.
2) call their sales department and make the order (it was 7pm)
3) Purchase similar item from different supplier
Yeah I choose number 3!
The thing that bugs me about this conversation is that we are still having it in 2013! It strikes me that a lot of IT departments have known about this issue since the release of IE7 7 years ago! What the fuck do they expect build something once on some proprietary code base and think it will continue to run forever! Yes you could just run it on internal systems but the flags have been there for everyone to see for years!
The other part of this question that puzzles me is how complicated are these internal systems that could not be re-written easily using more modern code and open standards?
@BeerTokens: "What the fuck do they expect build something once on some proprietary code base and think it will continue to run forever!"
You're forgetting that being able to do that was precisely the lie developers were pushing when most of these businesses were being sold "web applications" as a replacement for their internal Windows applications in the first place. Having been told it would free them from the pain of having to upgrade systems as regularly and bypass all those compatility issues, only to find out in managed neither, it's hardly surprising many are sceptical about doing it all again just because another bunch of web developers are touting how HTML5 will make all those same problems go away and everything will "just work"
Until the industry grows up a bit and learns that you just can't break existing applications, regardless of what kind of crappy code they have, the world will be lumbered with the pain of massive fragmentation in the browser market and people running old versions just to make site X work.
> 1) Install it in wine and piss around trying to get the bugger to work. I don't care what anyone else says I've never found wine reliable.
This is pretty much automagical in any recent variation of wine including the commercial ones they sell in the Mac section of Best Buy or the one you can get from the Ubuntu repository.
That's not a very interesting example of wine really.
Inept management with a taste for wonky policy over longterm strategy will never be proactive. The only known temporary cure for their doofusitis is a hefty boot up the arse, preferably a wince-inducing financial one. XP, IE6 and Office 2007 were still in daily use at my last public sector job. The real pain for the clingy ones is when their slothlike SQL Server ugrades require more than one step to extract the contents of the db.
Following Google's failed attempt to take over the socmedia market with the cavernous echo chamber that is G+, I'm even more wary of their hype-fuelled ambitions exceeding their ability to deliver.
As a browser, Chrome has some odd behaviours which I find slightly offputting. The default UI's a bit meh too.
I wouldn't use IE if MS paid me. Firefox may be delightfully klutzy, but it does what I want it to, happily integrates Adblock, and doesn't insist on phoning home every five nanoseconds.
IE in any version is CRAP. However, being able to install and update Chrome manually without resorting to Helldesk makes all the difference.
Ever since windows7 was deployed here, our intranet geniuses were forced to recode all to the new IE and forcibly it works in chrome.
They are certainly jealously guarding their intel take from the competition. Monitored, card-reader-protected doors, elevators everywhere and so on.
They won't divulge a bit of their treasure, except when they receive a piece of paper with an FBI, DHS, or any of the other 277 eligible agencies' letterhead.
on the point of google being like m$ in promoting their interests -
1) Google products and services do work with other browsers, including IE and in fact, even konqueror ! It treats konqueror as 'safari'. This may change if they become the dominant browser. However, Google does follow standards for the most part, even if they happen to be among the first to support them. Of course, their desire to push dart reminds one of active X etc.
2) m$ went above and beyond giving preference to IE in THEIR products/services. IMO, they were within their right to support IE over and above competitors' browsers. What I cannot condone is the fact that they twisted every ISV to do the same. I haven't forgotten how most 3rd party software insisted that they would only work with IE, even when the s/w itself was a desktop or client server application ! In fact, many of them even bundled IE as part of their installation process since windows 95.
Yes, most companies resort to such tactics to promote their business but m$ went above and beyond the call of nether primarily because they totally lack imagination, brain power etc to actually run a tech business and they would be lost without their underhanded ways. For e.g., look what browser dominance led to - NOTHING. It was easy for m$ to screw competitors on windows and then WHAT ? If they had any imagination, they would have come out with new products and services based on this dominance; instead, they wait for someone else to come out with ideas and then steal from them.
I don't like Chrome. I don't like the idea that Google - an advertising company - should also be in the browser business. They also don't seem to be very good at developing secure software: Secunia's vulnerability list had Chrome at the top of the table for number of vulnerabilities last year...
I don't understand why Adobe feel the need to install Chrome by default when installing flash player, either, but I am not party to any agreement that's happened between the two companies.
Firefox? Sure. Chrome? Too many ulterior motives for Google I'm afraid.
"Browsium said every discussion it's had in the last six months with its customers has been about using Catalyst with Chrome in addition to IE. Not one discussion involved Firefox"
Maybe it's because they are using Firefox, Chrome and Opera without using Catalyst?
Not really the same strategy. There's a very significant differences between Microsoft's past browser strategy and Google's. That is, when Microsoft "recommended" IE, they were at times making pages that did not follow industry standards, or even attempt to. They were in fact trying to use non-standard behaviors and addons and extensions to lock people into the use of IE specifically, making pages that in fact did not work properly except on IE. They then made no effort FOR YEARS to improve their standards compliance, expecting people to accomodate the limitations and bugs of IE. See the complaints of businesses that still have IE6 for their custom site for the remaining examples of this.
Google is making Chrome conform to HTML5, recommending people use HTML5, and (by specifically supporting recent IE and Firefox), making sure they are not using some odd corner case of HTML5 that only Chrome supports to lock out other browsers. Also, in reality I haven't come across a google product that actually *needs* newest firefox, they just don't want the support nightmare of providing *formal* support for browsers that the browser vendors themselves aren't really supporting (they support it by recommending getting the newer version.)
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